Nostalgia is sweet and pleasant, but it can become a poison

It all depends on how we experience it. If the trigger is regret for what never happened, it produces pain.

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THE VALUE OF NOSTALGIA
Should we be afraid of nostalgia? It depends. 
There are particularly ambiguous feelings that can express, with equal force and at the same time, sensations in opposite directions. Among these, nostalgia is certainly a paradigm of the duplicity of emotions. From one part of it is the pleasure of memory, A word that no one, especially as we age, can escape: people, situations, images, emotions. Everything is interpreted in a dreamlike manner, as if in a dream, to the point that, to avoid fraying the fabric of our memory, we add facts and details that never happened. We force reality, where an unpleasant detail could taint the nostalgic dream of memory. Even people are transformed and recalled without blemishes or flaws, in the light of a facelift. memory literaryThe second dimension instead inevitably leads into the darkness of pain: with nostalgia we bring something and someone to the surface because we miss them, and the absence weighs more, to the point of transforming what should be only a pleasure into a poison, as it brings us back to regret for what could have been and was not.
Should we therefore be afraid of nostalgia? It depends on how we manage it, and feel it in one of the two opposing dimensions, in some cases rather mixed. If we start from the etymological root of the word (from the Greek nòstos, I'm coming home, and algos, Pain, suffering), we should avoid this state of mind because of the discomfort it can cause. But if we dig deeper, guided by the compass of our personal experience, we discover a new face of nostalgia, a mixture of poignant pleasure and vital energy. The memory of the past is fluid, illuminating the present and offering glimpses of the future; it is a canvas we reconstruct by piecing together the fragments of our lives that have left their mark. We need this nostalgia like oxygen; it carries us into the limbo of the memory, of memory, of a past that always returns to us in disguise. Nostalgia smells of authentic life, and grants us the self-defense of a palpitation of time, sheltered from haste, from the constant rush and flow. A natural antibiotic against chaotic lives they risk losing their meaning.

It's no coincidence that nostalgia has illuminated great pages of literature . From the Odyssey, the ancient poem of nostalgia, to the classics of great nineteenth-century European literature. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian intellectual who, more than anyone else, during the second half of the twentieth century, tried to alert us to the risks of modernity, of a world that has faded too quickly, also due to a technology that shows no mercy to the hands of the clock, was a nostalgic. Nostalgia, like that which permeates many pages of Marcel Proust's novels, is life . Strengthened by memory, open to the future, but capable of not abandoning the emotions of the past, ready to appear through the door of memory. And it's not true that nostalgic people are, by definition, elderly people. You can enjoy the pleasure of nostalgia at any age, avoiding being drawn into the trap of those who try to label it as a taste for the retro, for what has passed and will never return. This nostalgia has a creative force , as a recovery of the fullness of time, where the present is not everything, but only the transition between the past (and therefore the memory to be cultivated) and the future (the impetus towards utopia).

The picture reverses when nostalgia becomes the interpretation of regret, often coupled with remorse. At that point, the present fades, the future is barely visible, and everything spirals into a past, distorted by a memory that falsifies it to satisfy our sad impulses. Crossing the narrow confines of regret, for what could have been and wasn't, nostalgia loses all its driving force, nailing us to the ironic yet truthful phrase, "How much better we were when we were worse." The nostalgic person can no longer savor the pleasure of a pounding heart; of the curves of love, they see only those that lead off-road, condemning themselves to various forms of solitude . More than a pleasure, this nostalgia is a poison, injecting the virus of depression.

The nostalgic, in his public dimension, distorts history, depicts contexts that never existed, speaks of events that occurred only in his regret-tainted imagination. He sees, recounts, and convinces himself of what never happened. He becomes incapable of interpreting the present, and is frustrated by an impossible "homecoming," to return to the etymology of the word. For him, nostalgia is what the Greeks described in their use of the term: pain and suffering.

Famous quotes about nostalgia

  • "I don't know what I'd give to have you here beside me... I call you, I call you, I call you." Gabriele D'Annunzio

Nostalgia has always been a great source of inspiration for poets everywhere. Here, D'Annunzio captures, with remarkable brevity, the longing for distant love. Or perhaps a love that's ended. In any case, it's unattainable. Even in this case, nostalgia can help us communicate with the person we long to be by our side, and can only call.

 

  • «Nostalgia: the memory of things past» William Shakespeare

The first level of nostalgia remains memory. Good or bad? It depends: what matters is the value of memory , without which there can be no leap toward the future. But only a spiral into the present, into an eternal present.

 

  • "We never heal from what we lack; we adapt, we tell ourselves other truths. We live with ourselves, with the nostalgia of life, like the old." Margaret Mazzantini

We can also feel nostalgic for life, for its natural evolution. Ultimately, when we go back in time, into childhood memories, into the emotions of adolescence, we simply dive into the ocean of nostalgia. And what we truly miss—not an object but a person, a feeling—sadly will leave us with a poignant memory that can translate into pain from which there is no healing.

 

  • "Music doesn't express the passion, love, or nostalgia of this or that individual, this or that situation. But passion, love, and nostalgia themselves." Richard Wagner

Classical music is one of the art forms most anchored in nostalgia. It feeds on nostalgia. Claudio Abbado said that the most emotional moment of a concert, even for a conductor, is when he sees someone cry. The tears of joy, of emotion, and of nostalgia.

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